The situation with children committing serious crimes is serious, but lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 14 is not the right way to address the problems. This is according to Anna Dorrian, who is responsible for influencing at the organization Children's Rights in Society (Bris).
What is needed instead is to ensure that resources are invested in what has an effect.
Right Support
She does not believe that a lowered age of criminal responsibility will lead to fewer children under 15 committing crimes.
Bris instead wants to see "earlier interventions and right support" to ensure that young people really get help to leave criminal environments.
We are very concerned that the government is presenting this as if all other tools have been exhausted and that we now have to take this path, says Dorrian.
Younger Children
Swedish Unicef is also critical of the proposal and that the issue has been investigated at all.
The proposal being presented now is not compatible with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the assessments made by, among others, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. They have given sharp recommendations on investigating this issue, says Amanda Bertilsdotter Nilsson, child rights lawyer at Swedish Unicef.
Unicef sees a risk that the policy will further shift and approach even younger children, she says.
Even at an early age, when a crime has been committed, society must be able to meet up and provide children with care, support, and treatment rather than repression and punishment.
Getting Ahead
The Children's Ombudsman Juno Blom says that early measures are needed. In cases where children commit serious crimes, they must be taken into custody in locked institutions, partly to protect potential future victims - but also to protect the children from continuing to commit serious crimes.
But we also clearly land on the fact that a lowered age of criminal responsibility is not the solution to this gigantic and serious problem, says Juno Blom.
Instead, she points to the importance of society getting to the children who are in the risk zone before the criminals who plan and recruit children into crime.
My appeal to the country's municipalities is to take all reports of concern that are on the social services' table much more seriously than we manage to do today. I also think that they should contact every school and say "come in with information about children you are worried about", says she.
